


About Today

by hart_and_sole



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, Cunnilingus, F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-11-07 07:12:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17955962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hart_and_sole/pseuds/hart_and_sole
Summary: Diego likes to use sex as a distraction technique. That doesn't stop Eudora thinking about the distance growing between them afterwards.





	About Today

**Author's Note:**

> Was listening to The National's About Today, and thinking bout how you can feel yourself drifting apart from someone while being right next to them, and feeling helpless against it.
> 
> No beta - please excuse my love of semicolons!

He eats her out like a starving man in the land of milk and honey; laid out below her in supplication; hands cradling her hips to steady her helpless shudders; tongue lapping at her clit with gentle but relentless persistence. He's come already, and now he's working her body to completion; all their fire and frustration with each other transferred, for now, into sex. He lifts a hand up to stroke across her neck; her jaw; looking up at her with heavy, lidded dark eyes before he starts to suck, and then she's coming; crying out as her body judders and jerks in waves of pleasure.

When she raises a trembling hand from across her eyes he's still down there; eyes crinkling up at her in a way that tells her how pleased he is with himself right now. He pulls himself up, mouth still glistening with her juices, grinning now.

“Diego, no!” she shrieks helplessly, laughing and batting at his arms as he tries to kiss her.

“Aw, come on, Eudora, you taste great!”

“Nope. No way!”

He gives her an exaggerated pout but reaches for the tissues on her bedside cabinet to wipe off his face. “Now?” he asks hopefully, giving her those ridiculous eyes, and she rolls hers and pulls him into a kiss. He gathers the covers up around them, puts his face into her neck and breathes a question there. “We good?”

Eudora lets out a heavy sigh and brushes the back of his neck gently. “Yes, Diego. We're good.” For now, she doesn't add out loud.

He lets out a heavy breath, and something in the set of his shoulders begins to relax. His smile is sweet and boyish as he lays his head on the pillow, hand reaching out and settling on her waist as his eyes grow heavy with sleep.

He makes it so fucking hard to stay angry with him, she thinks as she watches him drift off. The sheets have puddled down to his ribs as he shifts in his sleep, and her eyes rake over his body; at the brutal scars and new bruises and slowly clotting gashes he's earned himself tonight. There's no talking to him about this, but she can't stop trying. She draws a tentative finger along the scar on the side of his head. He doesn't stir. It's long and thick and puckered and she imagines, sometimes, how you must've been able to see the bone-white gleam of skull amongst all the gore of his parted flesh. He said he'd been fifteen, when she'd asked. “My own fault, honestly...” Offhand and sheepish, and she'd choked down her own shocked, sudden anger. He didn't always _know_ , then, what might provoke horror in people who hadn't grown up like he had. People who'd watched him fight in his mask and his schoolboy shorts and cheered him on, never knowing what it cost him.

She'd met him at a crime scene; her a newly fledged rookie; him the guy who'd stopped an alleyway rapist. He hadn't worked solo much yet then, and hadn't known what else to do but sit there and wait for the cops when the tearful victim had wrapped herself around him like a squid and refused to let go. Her partner hadn't known what to do with him either – he'd saved a woman but he'd also put a few holes in the rapist. When he – reluctantly – gave his name, somehow things got kind of waved away, at the station.

She couldn't tell you now what it was about him, but she'd found herself giving him her number. He'd been aimless; trying on different jobs to see that none of them fit; playing in sloppy bands and slugging it out in boxing rings at weekends. The vigilante shit had been mostly accidental then. He hadn't gone looking, not really, but he had the instincts, and when he saw that someone needed help he couldn't help himself.

It had been her to talk him into joining the academy, and part of her wonders if that's why it's so hard to watch him doing this to himself now.

He'd been so pleased with himself to begin with. She'd been so proud. Obviously he aced the physical. No-one could put him on his back in hand to hand, even when the black belt instructor had taken it personally and tried to put him in his place. He moaned and whined like a baby when no-one would let him take down a perp (or target) with a throwing knife (“Like a bullet does so much less harm than an itty bitty knife. _Right_.”) but he was still eerily accurate with a gun. Even if some jealous trainee tried to fuck with him as he took a shot, he would still hit metaphorical bullseye; seemingly defying the laws of physics at times. If the knife thing carried through, maybe he was.

His more competitive classmates would have hated him less if he'd just been a dumb jock that could only do the physical side of policework, but Diego also had an innate instinct for a crime scene and how to put himself in a perp's shoes. No, what had fucked him over was the fact he had no functioning idea as to why their rules might be important. He cared about helping people at the most basic level, and you could not put it through his thick, darling idiot skull why chain of custody or “reasonable” force were important. If someone needed immediate help, all his training seemed to simply go out the window. His psych eval seemed to depend on who he got and what they happened to ask. The academy _wanted_ him. But to any normal baseline, Diego was...unstable.

She got it, she really fucking did. He hadn't been raised to the standard of any normal functioning human being. He'd been a weapon, and God knows that kills her to think of, but she knows – _knows_ – he's not going to make the cut. He's out at night doing what the police can't, even now, so maybe he knows it too.

She doesn't know if he knows they're not going to work either. He's going to do what he thinks he needs to do, no matter who he hurts. Himself included. Especially himself.

It kills her to think she helped shape him into this. That he heard “But you're _good_ at this, Diego. You could make a difference,” and he'd pinned a burgeoning self that he hadn't known what to do with upon that. She wished to God she'd known and understood the ways that old man had fucked him up before she'd said that.

She wishes she knew how to fix him. But he can barely tell her the ways in which he's broken; held together with nothing but butterfly stitches and sheer will. So she watches him come through the door in the dead of night holding his ribs and walking like an old man; proud grin on his face, and she berates him and lets him make it up to her with sex, but she doesn't know how she's supposed to break it to him that she can't keep doing this. That she can't keep watching him do this when she's so close.

He frowns in his sleep and reaches for her. She gathers him close and lets his now drooling mouth rest on her shoulder. She wishes, and wishes as she holds him against her. She presses a kiss into his scarred temple and wonders if tomorrow's the day she lets him go. Tonight, she can't quite bear it. Not yet. Not today.


End file.
